Chapter 1
(Thank you to
MetalDragon,
Siatru,
WrandmWaffles, and
Sunny for giving this a look.)
And so, my third life began. This one was something of a mixed bag from the word go, as I had been reborn in my native land of Japan, yet retained my female body from my second life. Shockingly, for a Japanese child, I seemed to have retained more than just my gender from my previously life – a look at my reflection in the window into the maternity ward showed that I had the same bright blue eyes as before, and I could see a hint of blonde fuzz beneath the warm knitted cap on my head.
I was happy that I had been reborn in such a reasonable time. Judging by the garb of adults – parents, doctors, and nurses – that passed through the ward, I had been reborn around the same time my first life had ended. That meant I was born in a country and time where logic, rationality, and hierarchy were prioritized, and where my skills from my first life could smoothly transfer over. In a way, I supposed that Being X had done me a favor by reincarnating me in such an ideal and peaceful time, presumably by accident. I decided that I would capitalize upon its mistake, and live my life to the fullest here, far from the shells and mud and blood of my previous life.
And so, I grew.
Years passed. I was walking and talking once more within a year or so, and had finally managed to strengthen my new mouth and tongue to the point where I could speak in full sentences by the time I was two. My life was fairly easy as a non-orphaned child, even if only my mother seemed to be in the picture. She worked nights, presumably at some sort of hostess club considering her work outfits, and was never around much since she slept for most of the day.
To her credit, despite her diminished presence in my life, my mother had made arrangements for my care. The neighbor woman she left me with made sure that I was fed adequately, and otherwise thankfully left me alone in a cradle for the first year, and then a pen for the second and third. I taught myself to use the toilet as soon as I had the leg strength to do so, freeing myself from the indignation of diapers and further reducing the number of times she had to interact with me.
Unfortunately, this left me with long periods of time on my hands with little I could do as far as professional development or education went. It was a lonely time, and almost painfully boring. I slept as much as I could, but after a certain point even sleep somehow became boring. I began to keep myself occupied by reading whatever scrap of paper I could find, and by jolting down and solving various geometric proofs and algebraic equations to keep my math skills somewhat fresh.
My primitive attempts at entertainment by way of education seemed to spook my minder, considering how poorly she reacted the first time she found one of my proofs. I knew that my handwriting was poor, although in my defense it's very hard to write with a toddler's hands, but I didn't think it merited her wide eyes or the sudden and startling intake of breath, nor the ensuing scream. After that incident, she grew increasingly reluctant to interact with me, and instead sat as far as she possibly could from me in her cramped room, staring at me for hours on end.
It was disheartening, and I didn't really know what to make of it. On one hand, I could understand her surprise at finding a three year old capable of geometry. But what I couldn't understand was why the discovery of a simple diagrammed and annotated circle had made her so scared of me. I had done nothing to her, and yet I was being punished.
Thankfully, this fright on her part eventually yielded a solution to my boredom.
"I won't do it anymore, Aika!" The thin walls did little to keep out the sounds of the argument next door. "I don't care about the money! That child is unnatural! A freak!"
"...Fine, fine. She's weird. I don't see why this is such a big deal." As always, my mother's voice was flat, almost toneless; the occasional barbs of emotion practically drowning in a sea of exhausted apathy. "She's figured out how to use the toilet, so you don't even need to clean up the mess. Considering how much I'm paying you, it's easy work."
"I'm telling you," the neighbor's voice, anger thickened into determination by poorly hidden fear, grew progressively louder. "It's not about how much you pay me! That girl knows way too much for her age! I've never met a three year old that could write their name in legible
kanji, and I've never heard of a toddler doing math! She's weird, and I'm not gonna have anything to do with her! Never send her back to me, you hear?"
The door slammed behind my erstwhile neighbor, though I could still hear her stomping angrily off down the halls of the apartment building. I also heard my mother's irritated sigh, followed by the sounds of her popping open a beer bottle and pouring herself a drink. I gave her a moment before I slowly opened the door connecting the bedroom to the other room of the tiny apartment.
Hajime Aika, my mother, was already in her work uniform. Typically, she got home from work at around four or five in the morning, fed me breakfast at seven before dropping me off at the neighbor's, and slept until three in the afternoon. I'd return to the apartment at four, usually just in time to say goodbye to her before she headed off to her job. I rarely got to see her after she woke up and before she was out the door. She wasn't unattractive, but sitting still on a cushion, glass in hand and eyes fixed on the blank wall across from her, she looked far older than her nineteen years.
"Guess I'm gonna have to do something else with you, huh?" My mother wasn't unaware of her surroundings, despite her thousand yard stare. I supposed that it was important to maintain situational awareness in her line of work. "The old bitch isn't going to take you back again. Why'd you have to scare her like that anyway, huh?"
"Sorry, Mom." I padded across the old
tatami, my nose long since inured to the smell of stale straw that should have been changed out months ago. "I was bored. Didn't mean to." Even that short statement was surprisingly tiring to enunciate. My mouth was still developing, and it was hard to shape the words correctly.
"Yeah, yeah. I know." She finished her beer in a long pull, and then eyed the small and noisy refrigerator that stood in the small corner kitchenette for a moment before regretfully shaking her head. "What the hell am I gonna do with you? Money's tight, you creeped out the cheapest babysitter on the block, and I can't just leave you here."
"Why?" I strained and pulled, and finally forced the ring-tab up on the tuna can I'd retrieved from the pantry. "I can feed myself." It was infuriating how difficult it was to pull open the lid of the can. I heaved and tugged at it, and finally the lid began to separate from the tin.
"Oh, c'mon, give it here." My mother's perfume surrounded me as she reached down for the can. I jumped slightly. I'd been so focused on opening dinner that I hadn't heard her getting up from her cushion. I relinquished the can to her adult hands, and she opened the can with ease before handing it back. "Ugh, that shit stinks. Hope none of that smell gets on me…"
She returned to her cushion, shaking her head with exasperation. "And no, I can't just leave you here. What the hell do you think would happen to me if anybody realized I'd just left you here, huh? I'd go straight to jail. No…" She sucked at her teeth, before she slumped back against the wall. "No, I'm gonna have to see if I can get you into school."
"School?" I'd never had children, nor had I been interested in the topic of childcare, but three seemed a bit early for school.
"School." My mother repeated firmly. "I don't have much of a choice. Besides, if you're bored enough to be freaking out the neighbors, maybe you'll actually enjoy it." She closed her eyes, and her already toneless voice turned outright melancholic. "Just a pity about my savings, but… Well, I guess that's what they're there for. Not that there's much… Guess I'll just have to work harder… And start expanding my menu…"
My mother trailed off, mumbling as she rubbed at her forearms. I didn't ask about the last thing she'd said. I didn't think I'd want to hear any of the details. I just thought about the prospect of school. Admittedly, I would just be enrolled in kindergarten, presumably, or some other young program, and I'd be younger than everyone else present, but… It would be something. Just something to do, to keep busy with; the first step towards a better life.
I looked back at my mother, before looking back down at my tuna. Previous lives or not, it was always hard for a child to see their mother cry, especially since I was fully aware that I would be the beneficiary of all of her hard work.
I would have to do my best to repay that debt some day.
---------
Once the neighbor refused to look after me despite an offer of higher pay, my mother made alternative arrangements and managed to enroll me in kindergarten earlier than normal. Finally, I was given something to do with myself other than scribble on loose envelopes and the like.
The program she enrolled me in was highly-structured, with all activities geared towards admittance into a private elementary school. While this would undeniably tax my mother's income, I made sure to focus on my studies, hoping I could do well enough to earn some form of scholarship for admittance. Failing that, if I had to attend public school, perhaps good exam scores could earn me advanced placement or whatnot. This would be my first path on the road to success, so I couldn't do anything but my best.
It was just as well that I had my studies to focus on; there was no point in interacting with my peers, and my teachers all refused to interact with me as well. I'd have thought that they'd be happy about having a charge that they didn't need to clean up after, and who wouldn't bother them for a story or a snack, but by the end of my first week their eyes looked the same as my erstwhile babysitter's had. Fortunately, the teachers decided to continue to accept my mother's money, and so I continued to do my best to excel.
And in the end, my best proved good enough. I somehow managed to be awarded a full-tuition scholarship to an elementary school at age four, which clearly must have been desperate to increase enrollment if they were willing to hand out free rides to kindergarteners. My mother was deeply relieved by the news, as it certainly meant that she could save more money from her hostess job. Hopefully this would go into continuing to pay our rent and bills, and she would be relieved enough to stop spending so much of her income on cheap beer and terrible sake.
My first year of elementary school went tolerably well. Math and Japanese were, of course, no issue for me, and I was even able to impress a foreign language instructor with my rusty English. History class was a bit more interesting, because while Japan's history was much as I remembered it until a certain point, there were a handful of references to peculiar differences.
Some mineral called 'Sakuradite' was apparently a major export of Japan, and Perry's ships had electric motors. Clearly, my impressions of my new world over the last four years had been at least partially in error – this was not my original Japan, but one quite similar to the Japan I remembered. The changes in Japan's history became more pronounced as my textbook approached the modern era. From what I could glean from the simplified history, the oligarchs behind the Meiji Restoration had been a great deal more powerful, and the Emperor even more ceremonial. Following the debacle of the "Pacific War", which seemed like a reference to the Russo-Japanese War, the oligarchs had disposed of the Emperor entirely, founding the Republic of Japan.
All by itself, that last event was a shock. The idea that the Japanese would voluntarily discard the imperial system over what sounded like a crisis of only moderate severity, something that had taken a bitter war and two atomic bombs to accomplish in my own world, was astonishing. After all, we had still kept our emperor around as a ceremonial position, even after that cataclysmic war! Unfortunately, the textbook offered little insight into this incredible departure from everything I had ever known about my own people.
I decided to investigate a bit further, and requested a world history primer from my history teacher. The middle-aged man was kind, and gave me a 3rd grade textbook to read after I finished my homework. He seemed gratified by my interest in his subject, particularly as I recited the old saw about "those who do not learn from history".
Returning to my desk, I found that world history outside of Japan was even more strikingly different from what I remembered from my past two lives. For one thing, the entirety of the Americas were united under some sort of British empire. Given that the name of this superstate was the "Holy Britannian Empire", I could only assume that was Being X's favored player in this world's geopolitics.
All of Europe and Russia, as well as most of Africa, appeared to have also been united under a single flag as well, called Europa United and colloquially referred to as the "EU". Interestingly, despite the "Britannian" empire, the British Isles were part of the EU. A third superpower united most of mainland Asia, including China and India, and was known as the Chinese Federation.
Apart from the three major players, apparently the fractious Middle East had somehow united into a federation of its own as well, with an independent Kingdom of Zilkhstan to its east, at the mouth of the Indus. Strangely enough, despite New Zealand being a province of Britannia, Australia seemed entirely independent and went almost entirely unmentioned throughout the textbook. It was as if the entire world had collectively decided to ignore the continent.
Putting the nonsensical geopolitics of my new world behind me, I buried myself in my studies, doing my best to achieve academic success. It was just as well that I focused on my studies; my school life in the first grade was just as lonely as my time at kindergarten had been. My teachers clearly had just as little idea about what to do with me as my childhood minder, and kept their interactions with me minimal. On the other hand, I suppose that the other students needed more of their time, as I didn't need help to read or write or do basic arithmetic. I was polite with the teachers and dutifully followed every order I was given, and they gave me peace and quiet in exchange.
This was a step up from my interactions with my fellow students. None of them could relate to me, nor I to them. With my decidedly non-Japanese blonde hair and blue eyes, I was immediately marked out as physically as well as mentally different; my foreign blood was a taint, and unlike my intellectual superiority, my
hafu status was clearly perceived as a vulnerability, even by those young children. And so, the feeble attempts at bullying began. Fortunately, once most of the other children realized that petty taunts about my appearance rolled off my back, they collectively opted towards excluding me. That was fine with me; I didn't need nor want to interact with them. I just needed to study.
Unfortunately, a minority of the children were unwilling to leave me in peace. They attempted to "show me my place" by beating me up on the playground, or pinching me whenever the teacher wasn't looking. It was alarming how readily the urge to repay violence with violence swam up inside me in the face of such provocations. I was a civilized person, who after a life of horror and war had returned to a civilized country, but the instincts of my past life remained.
Along with the impulse to escalate to violence, another vestige of my previous life had followed me into my third. I could still do magic. Not very well, and not at a level that befitted an imperial ace, but I could still draw upon that inner energy. Over the years of agonizing drudgery, I had drawn on my memories of casting body and reflex enhancement more or less continuously to reduce the spells down to an orbless level. In fact, the circles and equations that my minder had been so frightened by had been an early attempt at working out the energy requirements of my simplified spells.
Ultimately, between the limited energy of my child's body and the need to use mental equations for the spell-casting process, I found that I could only cast minor physical enhancements. Thankfully, those proved more than enough for dealing with the more aggressive children. I endured what had to be endured, including the hissing mockery for running to a teacher whenever possible and always telling on my bullies. It would have been easy to use the strength of my piddling enhancements to tear them limb from limb, but that wasn't who I was. I had been forced into a war, but I was peaceful and law-abiding at heart.
These incidents didn't pass without notice. Both the teachers and the fellow students were well aware of the scuffles. Fortunately, as I was a small girl two years younger than my assailants, I was never blamed for any of these altercations, and my record remained free of any reprimands. After a while, even the would-be bullies left me alone.
Of course, that didn't mean that my life was carefree by any definition of the word.
"Another year, huh?" It was May third, the first day of the school year. I'd woken at six, the same time I always did, and to my surprise found my mother absent from our tiny apartment. She usually returned home no later than five. I'd been somewhat worried about my sole relation and provider going missing, but she'd staggered in half an hour after I woke up, stinking of alcohol and sweat.
"Yes, Mother." I finished putting together my lunch, and loaded the egg sandwich and plastic wrapped carrots into my secondhand lunch box. "I'll be starting the second grade today."
"I know, dammit." Aika's words were slurred with drink and exhaustion, and she slumped down to the foot of the wall, all but collapsing on her cushion. "I had to fill out all the fucking paperwork for your tuition. I remember what year you're in."
"Thank you, Mother." I picked up my lunch box and hopped down from the stool I used to access the counter, and trotted over to the canvas bag I'd used to carry my materials to school last year. "I'll make sure to get good value for your money."
"Fucking weirdo." I closed my eyes for a moment, and suppressed the pang of hurt at the muttered words. She was drunk, tired, and entitled to her own opinion. She was housing me, feeding me, and paying for my education; she was fulfilling the investment required of a parent.
Liking your child was not an investment required of a parent.
"I'm going, Mother." I scooped up my bag, already loaded with my notebooks and pens. "I'll be back by four in time to say goodbye before you go."
"Wait!" I paused, turning to the disheveled woman. For once, her eyes were fixed on me, and there was an emotion in her eyes instead of the typical exhausted blankness.
Was that… guilt? "Before you go… Well, I know I didn't get you anything for your birthday…"
I nodded, keeping quiet. I hadn't expected anything much, certainly not a gift. It had been surprising how much it had stung when she hadn't even wished me a happy birthday, though. I'd told myself sternly that it hadn't mattered. She was always working, and earned enough to keep a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. While she did drink heavily and constantly, she'd never drunken our rent, and I couldn't begrudge her foibles when I wasn't contributing.
I was surprised by how angry and hurt I still felt now, a month and a half after that forgotten birthday.
"I'm sorry…" Aika muttered, looking away from me. "I didn't forget, I promise. I just… didn't have enough to get you anything."
"It's okay, Mother," I sighed, slinging the bag over my shoulder. It was far from the first time in my many lives that a drunk had felt the need to unburden themselves of some transgression while in their cups. Apologies came easy in that state, and consequently were cheap. "I know you're working hard." I started towards the door again.
"Wait, I'm not done." I paused, one foot raised, before turning back to my mother. "I didn't have enough then… but I, uhh… I got a generous client last night, and he paid extra, so…"
I suddenly noticed that she had a large square box next to her. "And… I knew it was your first day of school…" Her voice thickened. "First day of second grade… And you only turned five back in March… I… Ugh…" She snorted, clearing her nose as she furiously scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. "Just take the damned thing. I'm going to bed."
The door to our bedroom slammed closed behind her, and I carefully tuned out the sounds of blubbering as I approached the box. In the dim light of the apartment, I couldn't read the writing printed on the surface. Reasoning that my mother likely wouldn't hurt me via some sort of elaborate trapped box, I shrugged and opened my present.
I don't know what I had expected, but it certainly hadn't been this. The red leather of a traditional
randoseru gleamed under the dying fluorescent bulb and the early morning sunlight seeping in through the window. I could tell immediately that it was a good quality backpack, made of genuine leather. Carefully, I hefted it out of its box. It was almost, but not quite, too big for me; hopefully I'd grow into it.
It had almost certainly cost the same as a month's rent for our apartment, if not more.
I don't understand. Is this a late birthday gift? A reward for early admittance into school? A sign of investment in my life and studies? What's the message here? Is she encouraging me to provide a return on her investment? I know she cares about me, at least to the required extent, but… this isn't part of that.
While I tried to puzzle out the message my mother was sending, I wasted no time repacking my school materials into the interior pockets of my new backpack. I didn't know what it meant, but I knew that it would make me look more studious and dutiful in the eyes of my teachers, and I'd have a material status symbol in the eyes of my peers.
I just hoped my mother would have enough to pay for our rent at the end of the month.
"Thank you, Mother." I bowed to the closed bedroom door, before I left for my first day of second grade.
---------
Petty schoolyard squabbles and family finances aside, another source of anxiety had begun to intrude upon my life. Every day on my walk home, I passed a convenience store that had a television tuned to the NHK news channel. Each day, the news reported increased aggression by the Britannians across the world. As 2008 ATB drew to a close, the Britannians began an invasion in Indochina, nominally part of the Chinese Federation. While Japan was not directly targeted, the Britannian Empire had begun to assert heavy economic pressure on Japan, despite the government's statements of protest.
Knowing Being X, and having experienced first-hand the march to war back in the Empire in my previous life, I was certain that things would go from bad to worse. This concern fueled my resolve to succeed as a student – after all, if I was a diligent student, the likelihood of being put on some sort of labor rota or last ditch militia in the worst case scenario would naturally decrease.
After slowly compiling a picture about the current political situation from scraps of news and gossip, I decided to approach my mother and ask what her opinions were. After all, I knew from my first life that drunken men often revealed an unwise amount of information to attractive ladies, and I hoped she might have some sort of insight about the spiraling national crisis. Unfortunately, that conversation hadn't gone quite as intended.
"You wanna know about Britannians?" I could immediately tell by the way my mother's normally monotone voice curdled to a growl on the last word that this wouldn't be a particularly calm conversation. "So you wanna know about Britannians, huh?"
"Yes." I replied, "You see–"
"I'll tell you about fucking Britannians!" The rest of the beer disappeared down my mother's throat, and her hard eyes turned on me. It was distinctly alarming to see her this way, especially because that beer had been her first of the day – she wasn't even drunk, and she was already visibly angry. "Your fucking father gave me all that I needed to fucking know about goddamned Britannians!"
"My father?" I hadn't really wondered about my father in this life. He had obviously been foreign, considering my hair and eyes, but between his physical absence and my mother's apparent unwillingness to mention him, I had considered him irrelevant.
"Yes, your father, that piece of shit!" Hajime Aika all but snarled the curse. "First that motherfucker fucking haggled down the price, and then he told me – he promised me! – that he had a vasectomy! Fucking never trust sailors, Tanya, they're all liars like your father!"
"He was a sailor?" I replied cautiously, eyeing the exits to the room in case I needed to make a break for it. My mother only seemed to be getting more angry with every passing sentence.
"Yeah, a fucking merchant sailor off some shipping boat. Not even a fucking navy sailor, just a fucking sea trucker." She spat with distaste. "I told him it didn't matter if he'd gotten snipped or not, we were still using a condom, and he said not to worry, because he had one."
Her face had gotten alarmingly blotchy with anger. I began to seriously worry that she might pop a vessel. "The damned thing was fucking ancient! It was probably older than me at the time! And it tore while he was in me but I didn't even fucking notice until he–"
She spat again, and glared first at me, and then at her surroundings. "Never fucking trust a Britannian, Tanya. They'll fuck you over and demand you thank them for the privilege. They're all bastards to the core – narcissists, dickish bastards. They're evil to the bone. A race of bastards. They'll fuck us all over, just like your
father fucked me."
For a moment, her gaze landed on me again, and I considered making a break for the door. Her eyes were bleak and angry, and I didn't know if my minor enhancements would be enough to hold her off if she came for me. A moment later, she blinked, and her eyes softened back to something approaching their usual misery. "You look so much like him. I almost don't see anything of me in there."
And that was the end of the conversation for the night. My mother did her best to drown her anger with cheap beer, and I did my best to tune out her drunken ranting and rambling as I mulled over the newly discovered information.
I had learned two things from that unfortunate conversation. First, my mother didn't work as a host, like I thought she did, or if she did, she provided extra services on the side. Second, I was a spitting female image of my Britannian father. Neither of these really explained how I'd ended up with the name "Tanya" again, but it did shed some light on my mother's seeming unwillingness to interact with me beyond the absolute necessities. While her parenting skills were admittedly lackluster, that shortcoming wasn't solely to blame for my situation.
Ultimately, I concluded that our situation wasn't truly her fault, and tried to explain my logic to her. I didn't throw her employment in her face, but I did mention how the deck was unfairly stacked against her due to her profession. I tried to reassure her that I didn't blame her for being a single mother, and that I appreciated that she had tried.
All my attempt at comfort did was prompt another ranting session, this one somehow even less coherent and more tearful. When she eventually took solace with a bottle and drank herself to sleep, I did my best to make her as comfortable as possible with my weak childish body and resolved to never bring up the subject of my absentee father again.
And so, another two years went by. I skipped another grade, at the recommendations of the History and English teachers, who were both overly impressed with my paltry skills. But, being a rational and socially conscious individual, I kindly thanked them both for their recommendations and moved on. I enrolled as a 4th grader at age six, and continued to study diligently knowing that in a mere two years I would have to be ready for middle school entrance exams.
---------
The inevitable war, when it finally came, was three days of confusion and horror followed by a month of collective chaos and pain. The Britannians had finally come after years of obvious buildup, and the Japanese government and military had proven woefully underprepared.
From my point of view, the war had come on very suddenly. One day I had been going to school, the next cruise missiles were streaking in from the sea and smashing into Tokyo, indiscriminately destroying civilian structures and hammering the city. I had been preparing for another day at school, and my mother had just collapsed into bed after coming home late from another night of hard work. We were very fortunate to both be at home, and doubly fortunate that my mother had made a grocery run only the day before.
The battle for Tokyo had lasted only a few hours. I'd watched from the window of our apartment as pillars of smoke rose all over the city, and as the major structures visible on the skyline buckled under explosive impact. I'd watched from the same window as squads of soldiers, wearing black body armor and helmets over gray uniforms, advanced rapidly up the street, completely uncontested.
I'd watched, and seen the bizarre Knightmare Frames, the newest toy of the Britannian military, for the first time as a squad of four rolled down the arterial road, oversized assault rifles slung at the ready as they skated along the buckling asphalt. They looked absurd, but I supposed I couldn't be overly critical; after all, I'd been a magical girl in my past life. They still looked needlessly clunky and vulnerable to my trained eyes.
It might have been seven years, six years in this world, since I left the Academy, but I couldn't help but find the Knightmares' complete lack of support strange as well. It was as if a junior officer who thought the cavalry charge was the end-all of military tactics had written their operations manual. Like light cavalry, they simply charged forward, without any infantry or armored elements following them.
It was almost a moment of solace, in the insanity of the first day of the Conquest. I mused upon the Knightmares and their seemingly careless advance as I tried to ignore the way our apartment building shook under the impact of massive explosions blocks away. I was certain they'd had some sort of air support, even if only recon elements that I hadn't seen; if they already had air support and plentiful information, perhaps their bold charge wasn't as insane as I'd first thought. Still, I would have expected more ground attack aircraft supporting the armored push. Maybe those had run short, or perhaps the aircraft were needed elsewhere?
Such thoughts could only distract me for so long. I saw many things that first day, ranging from the strange machines to the horror of watching a city shudder under bombardment. What I didn't see was any resistance. No hint of any Japanese units, and certainly no signs of civilian or partisan forces, not on the first day nor on the subsequent two days that preceded the statement of unconditional surrender, along with the announcement of the Prime Minister's ritual suicide.
I had little time and no interest in mourning the man. Somewhere, somehow, our government had screwed up, and had been taken unawares by the Britannians. Nobody had known we were at war until the hammer had come down. Nobody had time to prepare, and so things rapidly fell apart. Hunger and fear turned neighbors against each other, and it was all my mother and I could do during that first week to hide in our apartment with all of the furniture piled up against the door.
For my part, as I did my feeble best to help brace the door whenever we heard people in the hallway outside, I was less than thrilled about Japan's unceremonious and thorough defeat. I couldn't help compare the complete lack of defense efforts here to the Empire's ceaseless watch on the Rhine. While the defeat was embarrassing, I had hoped that the speediness of the Japanese collapse and the seemingly one sided dominance of the Britannian military would actually help soften the blow of the actual occupation. After all, after such a thorough defeat, there would be no need for prolonged fighting, reducing the rancor of our new Emperor.
Above all, I had hoped that the swift conquest of such a modern nation would decrease the amount and degree of social dislocation suffered by the defeated population. Our government had surrendered rapidly, and presumably lots of the lower levels of the bureaucracy were intact. That would mean that plenty of people with local knowledge would be around to help build a new government that would have some sympathy to the locals, even as it served the Britannians. , Only some areas of the city had seen intense enough fighting to completely level the local structures and roads, and while many buildings were damaged, I assumed that a proud empire like Britannia would want a more or less intact provincial capitol. Surely, I had hoped, life could proceed on as it generally had before we'd lost our independence.
I was quickly disabused of such optimistic thoughts as the true face of Britannian occupation became known.
First, we were not citizens of Britannia; rather, we were Numbers, non-Britannian residents of conquered lands. As Numbers, we had no political rights and few social rights, and apparently Britannia did not recognize any concept of universal human rights either. Functionally, being a Number meant being a member of a slave population from birth, even though we could work and own money and property.
If a Britannian claimed such property as their own, claims would apparently go through Britannian courts, who apparently routinely sided with the Britannian plaintiffs even when they entirely lacked evidence. Further, if any Number was believed to be a member of a resistance organization, they could be executed immediately by any member of the Britannian police or armed forces who apprehended them.
Second, the Britannians immediately made their presence known by removing the Japanese population from significant parts of Tokyo and other large cities, designating entire districts as part of the Britannian Concession. The only time Japanese, or Elevens as we were now, could enter the Concession was if we were employed there, and we were required to leave as soon as our shift ended. These Britannian-only areas were the only places rebuilt after the end of the war, with Eleven districts being left in states ranging from disrepair to outright ruin.
This was unacceptable, for me. While I had never particularly considered myself a nationalist – after all, enlightened self-interest was the principle motivator of an ideal capitalist system – the almost contemptuous way the Britannians had slapped us down rankled my Japanese heart. Further, this degradation of my personal circumstances was nothing short of a slap in the face. I had done nothing to wrong the Britannian Empire or any of its agents! I had wanted nothing but a comfortable life, and I had spent years of mostly solitary hard work towards that goal! I had done my best to be a good student, and to respect my mother – the little I saw of her – but suddenly all of that work was wasted.
And for what? For a government that had believed that we could stand against an empire that stretched across continents? For an empire that was so hungry for land and resources that they couldn't simply assert diplomatic pressure for favorable treaties, but had to wrest anything they wanted away by brute force?
Going from a tolerable position as a precocious student working her way up the social and educational ladder into respectability to a position as a second-class citizen in my own homeland severely hurt my belief in the system. Both my previous lives had taught me that, given hard work and time, any sane society would let a dedicated individual climb the ladder to safe and comfortable respectability. Even the war-mad lunatics in my second life's government had given me a shiny medal and a promotion after I demonstrated my loyalty and utility for them over Norden.
But this time around... This time I hadn't been able to do anything to either help my countrymen or help the invaders. I was a non-entity, a powerless child who at worst was just another piece of collateral damage waiting to happen. I was lucky I hadn't been blown up again in the invasion, or been attacked by angry Japanese wanting to hurt someone they saw as Britannian.
Matters failed to improve for either myself or Tokyo. The Britannian Concession seemed to grow daily, and soon my district was designated as Britannian-only. My mother and I were moved to Shinjuku Ghetto, a region that had seen actual fighting between the retreating Japanese Army and the invading Britannians. Of course, the Britannians had designated the shelled remains of the district as a Japanese-only district.
Making matters worse, we were only permitted to take a single bag of possessions each when we were evicted from our apartment. My
randoseru was crammed full of clothes, while my mother's suitcase contained whatever household goods would fit as well as our identification papers. We hadn't bothered taking my mother's meager supply of Japanese currency, as it had been declared invalid, and so we arrived in Shinjuku penniless with barely more than the clothes on our backs.
There was very little housing available in Shinjuku, and no schools or hospitals to speak of. Fortunately, my mother found a room in an apartment that the owner was willing to rent to us, and she began working again. She managed to secure employment in the Britannian Concession for a frightfully poor wage. I didn't ask about the bruises she frequently returned home with, nor how she managed to pay the rent and keep us fed. It was painfully obvious, but she still did her best to pretend she wasn't in pain and miserable when she was with me.
For my part, as formal education was no longer an option, I entered the workforce as well. I found work with a neighborhood association, joining other local evacuees in removing the rubble that choked the street. The work was hard, especially for my six year old frame, but the minor strength enhancement I could reliably cast made it barely doable. I still carried far fewer bricks and chunks of rubble to the wheelbarrow than the other workers, but I doubted anybody would judge a kid too harshly for being unproductive compared to adults. The payment was equally lousy – a bowl of watery
miso with vague shapes floating in it for breakfast, and a bowl of whatever was cooking in the communal pot at dinnertime – but it was enough to ward off starvation.
While I tried my best to simply carry on with my life as best I could and not make trouble for myself or my neighbors, not all the newly minted Elevens around me were equally thoughtful. Even before the first Britannian colonists arrived, the first resistance groups had begun to coalesce.
Groups of soldiers who had thrown off their uniforms but kept their rifles, sons and daughters of the civilians killed during the fighting, various criminal organizations, and random groups of angry young men all mixed and blurred in a disreputable soup in the corners of Shinjuku Ghetto, and soon graffiti from various organizations began appearing everywhere. Daubed on walls of crumbling apartment blocks and subway tunnels crammed full of homeless refugees from the new Concession, the tags proclaimed that Japan still lived, and that the Yamato Spirit was in the hands of groups like "The Blood of the Samurai" and "The Black Sea Society". Fanciful names and unfounded boasting, in my opinion. So far, none of these groups had done much more than throw stones at Britannian patrols, probably because the soldiers tended to respond with uncontrolled bursts of indiscriminate gunfire.
I respected their desire to continue to fight, but I couldn't help but resent the new rebel groups almost as much as I resented the Britannians. Their feeble attempts to resist the grinding wheels of oppression did nothing to actually help anybody in the ghetto, as far as I could tell, and every time they actually did something that irritated the Britannians, the reprisals were both brutal and inevitable. I'd read about the Irish Troubles as a child, back in my first life during Contemporary History classes, but my years in the Shinjuku Ghetto showed that even the most iron-handed of the British had been as respectful of the laws of war as I had ever been, compared to the conduct of the Britannians.
The first time a drunken Britannian soldier, staggering back to the Concession from some dive bar near the border of the ghetto, had been knifed in the kidney and left to die on the street, I'd been somewhat gleeful. The surge of knowing that the Japanese had gotten some of their own back was intoxicating, and reminded me of the pleasure of raining artillery spells down on Entente fortifications.
That joyous feeling turned to choking ash when I heard about the British response the next day. One hundred random Elevens had been grabbed off the streets, lined up against the wall, and unceremoniously shot. One didn't need my mastery of signaling theory to understand the message the Britannians were sending. The price of a single Britannian life was a hundred Eleven lives. My enthusiasm for the resistance dimmed after that particular incident, and I resolved to keep my head down as best I could.
And so, time ground on. I continued to haul rubble for my daily meals as my mother continued to work at night. While we eventually got the streets mostly cleared of rubble and debris, the overcrowded tenements of Shinjuku continued to fall apart, even as the incredibly gaudy architecture of the new Britannian Concession rose ever higher, dominating the skyline with spires and towers, all built upon the conquered ruins of Tokyo.
The never ending construction of the Concession, as well as the numerous suburban housing projects for Britannian families and the construction of manors for the nobles who had come to live and administer Area 11, had the side benefit of pumping some Britannian money into the Japanese sector, and gradually conditions improved. While outright starvation remained a grim and constant presence, the daily toll dwindled. Jobs other than street cleaning began to open up. It did my heart proud to see the flower of the free market beginning to spring anew from the cracked cement of Shinjuku.
Of course, the free market was no longer constrained to respectable public actors. The policing of the slum had degenerated as the Britannians grew more confident, and by the end of the first year after the Conquest the only times armed incursions of Britannian police intruded into Shinjuku were when one resistance group or another did something to aggravate the Britannians.
Whenever resistance did flare up, APCs full of soldiers backed by Knight Police – demilitarized Knightmare Frames armed with "non-lethal" weapons – would storm whatever building or tunnel had been identified as a rebel hideout. They'd drag away anybody who wasn't killed in the course of these stormings, and sometimes the lucky ones would even return to the Ghetto. The unlucky either disappeared entirely, or ended up on one of the chain gangs building the new mag-lev high-speed rail for the Britannians.
Admittedly, this was a large step up from the mass executions of the first year after the Conquest, but it was still collective punishment. And by no means did the acts of collective punishment end with mass incarceration, enslavement, or speedy extrajudicial execution.
At some point, the Britannians decided that as long as pillars of Japanese culture continued to exist, so would the wildcat resistance groups. The solution to this apparent problem was as sadly predictable as anything else Britannian – a maximum of force, with a complete disregard for anything but dominance and violation, just like my mother had said. Temples and shrines were burnt, libraries and museums gutted, and any fragment of Japan's rich architectural history that had escaped the initial violence or the subsequent reshaping of Tokyo was demolished.
In the ghetto, Britannian disinterest opened a wide power vacuum, which was rapidly filled by armed street gangs of varying degrees of sophistication. Drug use and alcoholism skyrocketed, and any feeble business the Britannians allowed to grow in the slums was inevitably crushed under demands for protection money. Honestly, I had somewhat naively hoped that the omnipresent poverty of the ghetto would improve things, since nobody here had much left worth stealing. Unfortunately, my understanding of the criminal mind was clearly lacking. The gangs fought for whatever scraps fell from the Britannian table instead of trying to actually grow their capital through gainful employment, and whenever they weren't fighting each other they were stealing whatever little anybody unfortunate enough to be noticed had.
Eventually, five years had passed since the humiliation of our one day defeat. Five years of constant work and scrounging, five years of hunger and pain and all too frequent death. In some areas of occupied Japan, things had begun to improve, or at least so went the rumors passed up and down the grapevine. The Britannians had finally reopened schools for Elevens, and had begun to institute some public health measures after a nasty cholera outbreak in Osaka.
As always, these alleged improvements came with hearty drawbacks and a callous disregard for our wellbeing.
The schools mostly focused on pushing Britannian propaganda, and cared very little for any pretense of education. I had taken the opportunity to enroll as soon as the doors opened, and during my brief time in the Shinjuku School for Elevens I learned much about the Social Darwinism beloved by our emperor, Charles zi Britannia, and more about the glories of the Britannian Empire, but very little of any real importance or use. For the first time, however, my mixed heritage broke my way, at least for a while. The Britannian instructors had been very surprised and apparently quite confused at finding a blue-eyed blonde with the name "Hajime Tanya" in their classes, but soon decided that my last name indicated I was Eleven, phenotype be damned, and thus just as worthy of their scorn and derision as the rest of their students.
At first, I had tried to stick to my guns and kept soldiering along on the path to a safe desk job, swallowing all the propaganda for my teachers and repeating it back, but my hopes were soon dashed once more. I asked one of the Britannian teachers what potential employment this coursework was preparing us for, and the man could barely suppress a laugh. I was told that the only work for Elevens was menial labor, unless I got lucky enough to catch the eye of a noble and be employed by his household. The way he phrased that option made me uncomfortable, and so I attempted to hurry up and ask about joining the army, only to be once more disappointed. Apparently, Numbers weren't allowed to join the armed forces, lest we end up shooting ourselves in the foot, according to the instructor.
As such, after only a month at the Shinjuku School, I left and returned to working with the local association. My move wasn't motivated solely by the lack of any real point to the education; I was also very hungry, and I couldn't afford to lose much more weight. The school administration hadn't even had the courtesy to provide students with a free lunch to help the propaganda go down – even the nuns back at the orphanage had fed me in my previous life.
While the need for strong arms to haul rubble had decreased, there was still plenty of work to do. I could always find someone who would spare a meal or two for ten or twelve hours of hard manual labor. I ate two meals per day again, which was a step up, but I was bitterly aware that the hard work and poor diet were eroding my growth potential; I hardly had the calories to get through the day, much less to actually grow like I was supposed to. I was eleven, but I was aware that I looked younger and thinner than my age. If it hadn't been for my magical enhancements and the one meal a day my mother could provide for me, I doubt I would have lasted past the end of the second year.
The Britannians didn't seem interested in employing all of the willing and hungry hands that filled Shinjuku in any capacity above day labor. Even more disheartening, it seemed like the closest thing to a cushy job I could ever hope for by playing by their rules was an appointment as a janitor, or if I got profoundly lucky, a lowly office menial.
The Britannians, I decided, were even worse than the communists when it came to managing their human resources. It was probably a result of their hereditary political elite, who by and large were born into their power and approved of assassination as a method of succession. Merit and hard work didn't matter, only the right connections and the right blood.
Worse than their lack of upwards mobility and reliance upon inheritance for political legitimacy, the Britannian system was deeply and profoundly racist. I looked just like them, but my surname and status as an Eleven made me practically sub-human. If an Eleven was publicly beaten by Britannians, nothing would come of it, unless the Eleven tried to resist, in which case he'd be arrested for assault. This angered me on a number of levels. As an experienced manager, this acceptance of bias into the talent acquisition and management process galled me with its inherent inefficiency. As a rational person, this categorical judgment and abuse irritated me as an assault upon the rational basis of a just and equitable society.
And as an individual, an Eleven, knowing that my place in the world was fixed, and that nothing I could ever do would make me a full human in the eyes of the invaders occupying my once and again homeland... I'm embarrassed to admit how the passionate emotions made my stomach churn with acid. I hadn't been this furious in years, not since I woke up for a second time as an infant. Once again, a power that I had done nothing to and which was far too strong for me to resist had forced me into a horrible and degrading situation.
It was, in a way, strange. Being X, despite not being a god, was clearly more powerful than the Britannians, but I'd still resisted him to the bitter end, minor lapse aside. In the face of the institutional depravity the Britannians brought to the table, though… Even that level of resistance seemed pointless.
Especially since I wouldn't be the only one paying the price.
I tried to press that line of thought down and continue my life of work, but it wouldn't leave my mind. Wars were fought first and foremost in the mind, and letting the Britannians defeat me before I'd even tried to find a way out of the trap was out of the question. I'd might as well join the Prime Minister in slitting open my belly at that point.
I continued to think as I worked day in and day out. There had to be a path somewhere, if only I could find it. In both the corporate culture of my first life and the military culture of my second life, schmoozing and connections were important, but they weren't the end-all, be-all. If you worked hard and showed results and promise, you could make a living for yourself. I had managed it as an orphan in my second life, after all. Here in my third life, though, Being X had really gotten me up against the wall. I wasn't a Britannian, much less a noble, so comfortable government employment wasn't even a dream for me this time around.
No matter how I looked at it, there was no way for me to reach prosperity through the system as it existed.
Which only left me two options, which I thought about as I scrubbed floors, picked vegetables, swept streets, delivered packages, and tried to block out the sounds of my mother at night in the next room over with the owner of the apartment we sublet our room from. I could either try to reform the system from the inside, or I could try to tear it down. Frankly, neither appealed to me. Reform was impossible without leverage and connections, of which I had neither. Plus, considering how the government was an absolute monarchy with a hereditary aristocracy, any reforms I managed to get implemented could simply be overturned by whichever corrupt, inbred imbecile lucked into the throne next.
Fighting the system seemed equally futile from where I was sitting. The combined military-industrial complex of my nation had apparently been squashed in hours, and the only halfway effective resistance I'd ever heard of were the dead enders from that same army hiding up in the mountains. The local resistance cells were lucky if they had access to small arms and a handful of ammunition, and it seemed like any attempt to fight back simply made life worse for all the rest of us.
In the end, the decision was made for me.
On my eleventh birthday, the status quo of hard work and hunger that had defined the last five years was completely upended when my mother failed to come home. I awoke tired and sore from the previous day's labor, just like usual, and found that her pallet was empty. I ventured out to check the landlord's room, but she wasn't there either.
An hour later, she still hadn't shown up. I'd eaten my very limited breakfast, and I really should have been out looking for work already, but I couldn't quite bring myself to leave the shared room. I was certain that she was just running late, and I knew that she could take care of herself, but I wanted to make sure that she was alright before I left for the day.
My relationship with my mother had never been particularly close. Our day to day interactions were almost perfunctory in their brevity. We lived in the same room, but I worked all day and she worked all night. Any time we could have spent together was further eroded by the rent she paid to the landlord by way of "special sessions" that I could clearly hear through the walls. The few remaining moments she spent awake she dedicated to finding and drinking any alcohol she could afford with whatever meager earnings she made. All of that combined to make our relationship distant at best.
Perhaps we could have been more than that, given some sort of bridging opportunity. Unfortunately, I'd never been good at getting close to people, and I could tell that my blonde hair and blue eyes had never stopped reminding her of my father. I was a constant reminder in a sea of constant reminders that the Britannians did as they pleased, and Japanese like her paid the price. I think that, more than anything else, made it all but impossible for us to connect beyond a very basic level.
But, to her credit, my mother never hit me, never withheld food from me, and did her best to care for me when I was sick and too weak to work. She never sold me, she never traded me for booze, and she never took out her impotent rage at Britannia on me. While that seems like a low bar to clear, far too many parents in Shinjuku had somehow slid under it. For all the discomfort of my life, I was doubly lucky; I had my magic, and I had a parent who at least tried to be there for me in the important ways. She had been unpleasant and a drunk, but she had never been a monster.
Tragically, that was more than I could say for most people.
Two hours after I woke up, a knock came at the door to the room. I opened it, and found the landlord glaring down at me.
"Your mom's dead," he grunted, "get your shit, and get out."
What? I blinked, the world swaying under my feet. "I'm sorry, wha–"
"I said," the bastard boomed, "get your shit, and get out of my apartment! Your whore of a mother is dead, so I've got no reason to let you stay! If you're not outta here in five, I'll throw you out myself!" I dimly noticed another man behind the landlord, standing by the door to the apartment. He looked angry, but didn't say anything.
Oddly enough, the bellowed demands helped. For a moment, I was back in Basic Training, back on a different continent in a different life. It was all I could do to force myself not to salute before I lept to my new task. The clock was ticking, and I had a job to do, something to focus on rather than the sensation that everything was sliding away from me once again.
Five minutes later, I was out on the street in front of the apartment building that I'd lived in for five years. I'd never call it home, though. My
randoseru, the most expensive gift my mother had ever given me beyond tuition and years of feeding and support, was on my back, crammed with every stitch of clothes I owned that I wasn't wearing. My single pair of ragged shoes were on my feet. I had nothing else in the world, nobody to depend on, and nowhere to go.
"Hey there," an unfamiliar voice came from behind me, by the door to the tenement. I turned and saw that the other man, the angry one from the apartment, was waving me over. For lack of anything else to do, I shuffled over to the man. His hair was full of pomade; clearly, he had resources, if not taste.
"You're Hajime Aika's, kid, right?" The man squatted down, lowering himself down so he could look me straight in the eye.
"I'm Hajime Tanya," I confirmed. "Who are you?"
"Kaname Ohgi," the man replied, smiling sadly at me. "Wish I could say it's good to meet you. I'm sorry about your mom."
"Do…" I swallowed, crushing down the emotion that tried to choke my voice. I didn't have time to indulge in whatever it was I felt. "Do you know what happened to her?"
Ohgi paused for a long moment, clearly trying to figure out what he should say to a child. "Someone found your mother over on Yotsuya Street, by the checkpoint. You know, the one into the Settlement?" I nodded; the areas around the checkpoints were densely populated with cheap bars and brothels, catering to the workers returning from the settlement with cash in hand, as well as the soldiers looking for cheap fun.
"For what it's worth…" Ohgi began, trailing off for a moment. I could tell immediately that he was about to tell a lie. "It looks like it was pretty clean. She probably didn't feel anything."
"Do you know who did it?" I didn't bother asking about his lie; either he'd deny lying, or he'd lie again. I was curious to see what he'd say in response to this question, though.
Probably another lie.
"...No. Nobody saw anything." Ohgi lied unconvincingly through his teeth. "But… I'm sorry you had to find out like this."
That much, at least, was true. "Thank you for bringing me word," I replied, ignoring the tightness in my throat and doing my best to be as polite and collected as our shared cultural heritage demanded. "I appreciate you taking time out of your day."
"Don't worry about it," he replied automatically, before frowning slightly. "Are… are you alright, Tanya?"
"I don't know," I replied, entirely truthfully. "At the moment, I'm just… I have other priorities. I was just evicted, after all. I…I need to find a roof over my head, and now that M… now that I'm alone, I will need to find work if I want to eat today." I looked up at the sun overhead; it was already almost noon. "I don't know if anybody's still hiring this late in the day though…"
Ohgi looked at me strangely for a moment. "Well… I can give you floorspace for a few days, if you want. I don't have a bed to spare, but I can give you a blanket and a pillow."
I eyed the man, carefully examining him for a moment. He didn't look like an obvious predator, not that such cursory observations meant anything in Shinjuku. At the very least, he didn't have any of the brightly colored scarves typically worn by gangsters wound around his upper arms, which was a promising step.
And it's not like I've got anywhere else to go.
"Thank you very much for your hospitality, Mister Kaname." I bowed to the man, doing my best to look appropriately grateful as my mind whirred. Now that my most immediate concern had been momentarily dealt with, my mind was free to wander back to my new unfortunate reality, and my ever worsening lot in life.
I didn't even have the energy to curse Being X.
Ohgi chatted as we walked, effortlessly keeping the mostly one-sided conversation moving as we journeyed through Shinjuku. Apparently, he'd been a middle school math teacher before the Conquest. "You're just about the age that my students were, back before all this," he pointed out, "I couldn't just leave you standing out by yourself."
I mumbled a vague thank you, and did my best to just focus on walking. One step after another. No thoughts about how hungry I was or how weak I felt, no need to think about my mother or wonder about what exactly had happened to her, and no need to think about the old injury Ohgi had inadvertently just picked at.
I was going to take my middle school exams soon… I'd probably be ready to try for early admission to high school by now…
Something about my expression made Ohgi falter momentarily, before he rallied and continued to talk about nothing in particular. I don't really remember what he said, nor how I responded. I grew increasingly numb with every step.
I silently followed the heavily quiffed former teacher to another run-down apartment block. This one looked to be in a slightly better state than my erstwhile home, but it was still falling apart, just like virtually everything else in Shinjuku. After we climbed seven flights of urine-stinking stairs, Ohgi opened the door to a dingy studio apartment, furnished with a small counter with a sink, a table and chairs, and two beds.
I watched blankly as Ohgi scurried around the room, laying out a spare blanket and a pillow on the floor, at the feet of one of the two beds occupying much of the single room. Some distant, analytical part of my mind could tell that he was trying to take care of me, to show me that he was safe. That information meant little to me at the moment.
After Ohgi showed me where I could stash my bag of clothes, I sank down to my knees on the blanket and stared off at the wall across from me. In the comparatively halcyon days before the invasion, my mother had spent much of her time at home doing the same thing, in a similar pose.
An uncomfortable silence filled the room. I couldn't figure out anything to say to Ohgi. I knew I should probably thank him for the floor space and assure him that I'd work for my own food and not eat from his supply, but I just didn't have the energy to speak. Thankfully, he occupied himself with fixing a torn shirt, and left me in peace.
Half an hour later, my internal numbness had begun to dissolve, replaced by a feeling of a slowly rising internal pressure.
Before I could figure that out, Ohgi's roommate broke the silence, entering the tiny studio with enough energy to bounce the door off the adjacent wall as he strode inside. Kozuki Naoto instantly dominated the room as soon as he entered, a friendly smile on his face and a bulging bag dangling in one hand. He had the sort of easy charisma that any good recruiter would kill for, coupled with a handsome build, broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist. Interestingly, he was very clearly a half-breed like me – his eyes were too wide, his hair was a dark red, and he was tall for a Japanese man.
I considered rising to greet him, but even that seemed like an almost impossible task at the moment.
Ohgi audibly sighed with relief at his friend's arrival, getting to his feet as Naoto locked the door behind him. The two men greeted each other with an unexpected intensity, half-hugging each other with a degree of emotion I didn't often see from my countrymen as Naoto dropped the sack he was carrying in his free hand on the room's rickety table before clapping his roommate on the back.
To distract myself from the incoherent storm of emotions slowly bubbling inside, I began to vaguely wonder about the true nature of their relationship, best friends sharing a room or something beyond. Not that it was any of my business, nor did it matter. No good HR manager lets biases or assumptions inform them about new hires, and I was proud of my ability to treat people without any of the biases I had grown up with in either my previous life in Japan, or my upbringing in a church orphanage. That said, I did feel a bit more secure in my new housing arrangement if what I suspected was true.
My thoughts about the possible nature of their relationship screeched to a sudden halt as the sack Naoto had dropped onto the table slowly tipped open. Through the open mouth of the burlap bag that had once contained potatoes, I could clearly make out very familiar roughened metal curves. Even from across the room, even with most of the bag's interior obscured, I recognized hand grenades when I saw them.
"The boys over in Kasumigaseki really outdid themselves this time!" Naoto was exclaiming to Ohgi, "From the sounds of it, security's really lax over there. Jiro actually got hired as a janitor at a warehouse some noble rented out for his private security force! He said he just found a box full of the things, loaded his pockets with them, and walked right out! That's probably why he was selling them for so cheap!"
"Ahh…" Ohgi's breath escaped in a long, pained, hiss as he stared at the incriminating munitions. He shot an awkward glance my way and sucked in through his teeth.
My gut dropped into a pit.
"… Before you go on…" Ohgi stepped back from Naoto, and gestured over towards me. "Well…we've got a new guest, Naoto – meet Hajime Tanya."
I felt my palms begin to sweat. I'd been wrong, so wrong. I hadn't needed to worry about traffickers or gangsters, and arguably either would have been preferable. At least the Britannians rarely bothered to kill either of those, and certainly not by the batch. Terrorists and rebels, on the other hand...
Mother… If you can still hear me, kindly punch Being X as hard as you can. And save a spot for me wherever you went.
